Improving Calendar Accessibility for Instructors

Improving Calendar Accessibility for Instructors in Vantage*

By Isabel Cheng, Sr. Product Manager, and Jonathan Hritz, Sr. Product Manager

Dates are important when setting up a new Vantage course, and there are a lot of places in Vantage where instructors can set due dates using a calendar element. When an instructor selects a date field in Vantage for a particular assignment, a calendar pop-up appears that allows them to select the due date they wish. 

The Challenge

Instructors navigating Vantage exclusively with their keyboards would only be able to close the pop-ups with a mouse click, therefore getting stuck with the calendar pop-up on their screens.

Additionally, once the calendar pop-up was closed, the visible focus—which helps users who are navigating a webpage with a keyboard know which item on the webpage has keyboard focus—would return to the web address bar, not the date field they had selected previously. 

These difficulties made this aspect of Vantage only partially accessible and highly frustrating for users who require keyboard navigation to do their work.

The Solution

To remediate this accessibility issue, we refined the visible focus on the calendar element so it would not skip to the next area and would retain visible focus on the date field when the calendar element was closed. 

Next, we added the ability to tap the “Esc” key to close out the pop-up element so that instructors can easily navigate to the next element on the page. 

These updates have made the calendar element significantly more accessible and less burdensome for instructors to use.

*Published 04/23. © 2023 Sage Publishing. All rights reserved. All other brand and product names are the property of their respective owners.